Classic Workbench; Problems with aca1233 accelerator.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Gaah, you're killing me now, man. You just need to copy the file from where ever it is on the floppy disk, into the C directory on your hard drive. Have you never used DOS before?

Like if the file is in the directory "Tools", you'd type:

copy df0:tools/acatune to SYS:C

Or if the file is in a directory called "Utilities", you'd type:

copy df0:utilities/acatune to SYS:C

Or if the file is on a floppy disk in an external drive, you'd replace df0: with df1: or df2: or whatever your floppy disk is. Are you familiar with commands like CD, Dir, List, etc.? You're making me feel like an old fogey now, for using dos commands, haha.

I don't know where the file is on the floppy disk, but it's there somewhere, probably in some subdirectory. You need to get it from there, into the C directory on your boot partition so you can add it to your Startup-Sequence.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You need to get a book, man.  
 
 Put the disk in the floppy drive.  I assume you only have one drive, so that's df0:
 
 Open a Shell window (usually in Workbench:System, in your case it would probably be in WB:System, since your Workbench partition is named weirdly).
 
 Type:
 
 cd df0:
 
 then type:
 
 list
 
 We need to find where on the disk the command is located.  Respond back with a screenshot of the directory listing of df0:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Just looking at the top of your screenshot again, ClassicWB is eating up more than half of your available chip memory. That is *HORRIBLE*, BTW. Dislike, seriously. Hopefully when you get the memory activated on your ACA, that will resolve itself somewhat.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

All right, well it looks like there's only three files on that disk:

ACATune-readme.txt
ACATune
Disk.info

That makes it easy. Ignore the Disk.info, that's just the icon for when you install the disk.

So:

copy df0:ACATune to SYS:C

That will put the acatune command into your C directory. Now perform the Startup-Sequence edits from earlier in this thread.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Aah, you shouldn't need to mess with boot priority, what did you do to your startup-sequence???

Edit: When you say "not loading your hard drive", do you mean Workbench isn't loading properly?  It just goes to a shell command prompt?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

My Amiga is in bits at the moment but today I hooked up my ACA1232 and mine also says SLOWRAM in Sysinfo. It's perfectly normal, your screen shot looks the same as mine. I had the 33MHz card connected and got 7.88 mips speed from Sysinfo. You should get a faster reading at 40MHz though...9.x I should think. It's obviously not slow ram though as that's not possible...there's only chip ram (2mb) and any other ram on an A1200 will always be fast ram, so just ignore Sysinfo here, I think the rom remapping is confusing it.

I would check this carefully.  I think because the RAM isn't there at initial power-on (i.e., not autoconfig, but waiting until you add it via the startup-sequence) all that stuff is getting loaded into "slow" (i.e., chip) ram, because that's the only ram that the system "sees" upon initial power on.  Dunno. How much chip ram do you have available after boot?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

No, its simply bypassing the cfcard entirely and loading the regular boot screen, the one that prompts you to insert the floppy disks. Its acting like there is no cf card at all.

But the card shows up in early startup?  Assuming nothing got knocked loose, hold down both mouse buttons.  Boot with no startup-sequence.  Type:

ed s:Startup-Sequence

Does the startup-sequence load?  Post a screenshot.  Don't make any changes at this point.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

There was some boot options in a settings/startup. They were:
Sequence, user, assign, cliboot,wbsmanager, minboot, safe, runlist, shell and whdload. I may have changed these yesterday by accident; I know I clicked on minboot and on safe. Could this be the problem?

This is ClassicWB stuff here, not standard Amiga settings.  No idea.  Format the hard drive and reinstall your operating system.  Get rid of that ClassicWB crap.  Honestly, that's what I would do.  How did you get stuck with that, anyway?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I'm sure a more experienced user could fix this in like, five minutes, if it was in front of them.  Did you buy the card pre-configured from someone?  Was it cheap?  You may just want to buy another one, and this time make NO CHANGES to it, other than to put the acatune command as the first line in the startup-sequence.

Heck, if it wasn't so expensive and time consuming, I'd almost say just mail me the CF card and I'll fix whatever you've got going on there.    Suffice it to say, I think one of those settings you accidentally changed messed up the startup of the thing.  And it probably is something really, really simple.  But really hard to diagnose via forums.  Man do I miss user's groups.  

Do you have any spare CF cards and set of Workbench disks perchance?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Well that is no bueno at all.  But it boots fine off floppy disk still?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

And yes indeed, adding the ";" to the startup sequence has fixed the cf card. Its working fine again. Damn good thinking chap!

Perhaps the acatune startup command would have to be placed somewhere else in the startup sequence. Perhaps classic workbench is
loading something else first? Or there is some kind of confliction?

adding the ";" semi-colon to the startup-sequence hasn't fixed anything. All it does is disable the command from running. Basically you're right back to square one again.

ACATune needs to be run as the first line in startup-sequence. It just has to. Well, I suppose it could be run later, but then you're loosing most of the benefits of the thing in the first place. I'm still going to go with "You have an incompatibility with ClassicWB" here, on this one. In one of your earlier screenshots you posted a picture of the first portion of your startup-sequence. This looks absolutely nothing like a normal Amiga startup-sequence should look, and included the line:

C:Execute S:Maxmem-Sequence

I have no idea what that is. Never heard of it, and is just one possible source of your compatibility issues.

Now personally I've never used ClassicWB and I never would. I think it's absolute rubbish, but that's just my .02 cents, I'm pretty opinionated about this stuff. I think you could get everything working perfectly if you went with a normal installation of Workbench. But barring that, you might want to start googling terms like "classicWB issues with ACA card". Maybe someone else has already had this same problem and there's an answer posted somewhere?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

No luck googling...Perhaps i could message the e-bay seller, it was he who set up the card in the first place. Worth a try?

Couldn't hurt I suppose.  Tell him you're trying to modify the startup-sequence to add the ACAtune command but after it's added the system won't boot.  What you need is someone who's an expert at both ClassicWB and that particular piece of hardware that you own, however.  I'm surprised there's not more ClassicWB users chiming in here.  Maybe they've all been scared off by the length of this thread, lol.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

You're in luck...

I replicated the issue.

That is some top-notch troubleshooting right there.  Kudos and dancing bananas to you!

:banana::banana: